OpenGL Threading "GLTHREAD" Seeing Improvements For Mesa 20.1

Well known open-source AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olšák has been focusing recently on improvements to glthread for OpenGL threading that is generally able to offer better performance.

The Mesa GLTHREAD functionality for OpenGL threading still relies on per-game/application whitelisting but the impact can be significant for many titles. For some games enabling GLTHREAD can mean around a ~30% improvement in frame rates.

There have been many GLTHREAD commits this week. Among the new activity by Marek has been enabling glthread for display lists, enabling the functionality for the title "From The Depths", and various code improvements.

Marek noted in this merge request that the compile time for one of the files has been reduced by 3x with his latest work.He's also been working on support for uploading non-VBO vertices and indices.

We will see what more happens on the OpenGL threading front over the next month before the Mesa 20.1 feature freeze at the end of April while the stable update should be out around the end of May.